The Unmade World

by Steve Yarbrough

“No?”

  “I work for her. For a good while now, I’ve also been sharing her bed. But I begin each day with the assumption that come evening, I might be looking for lodging. Understand, I’m not complaining. She’s a special woman. Her husband was a lucky man.”

  A lucky man who dropped dead at forty-six, most likely from trying to keep up with her. By the end of the second block, Bogdan is puffing hard. Nothing in either of the boxes he’s carrying is worth this much exertion.

  She parked half a kilometer from his building, in the lot near the Hala Targowa tram stop, where he bought kielbasa the night he was arrested. When they finally get there, she pulls a keyless remote from her bag and aims it at a Lexus SUV.

  Slowly, silently, without human touch, the cargo door begins to rise, its progress occurring independent of time. Bogdan sees himself rutting away between Krysia’s splayed legs as she whispers obscenities to hasten her relief, sees himself sitting alone on a park bench, a beer can balanced on his thigh. A young man with a perfectly knotted green tie shakes his head at the besotted figure laid out before him on the floor of a store someone else owns, a young woman with a pageboy cut and a small red purse walks down the street beside her new partner. Red snow, Marek’s mangled face, the dull thud of steel crushing the cranium of a diligent dog. Shattered glass, dead eyes, white fur turning scarlet.

  “What’s wrong, Bogdan?” his sister asks. “Better hurry. You want to be late for your own trial?”

  “I’m already on trial,” he says, prompting her to roll her eyes at Roman, who shakes his head and puts his arm around her brother’s shoulders.

  The proceedings take place in a small room where all the furniture looks like it came from Ikea. The desk he and his court-appointed attorney sit behind has a fiberboard top with walnut veneer, and the arms of their chairs match. The prosecutor, who could not have left law school more than two or three years ago, sits across the room at an identical desk, and the court reporter sits at a smaller one adjacent to the bench. To Bogdan’s left, there are eight or ten chairs like those he and his attorney are sitting in, but the only observers are Teresa and Roman. He made Marek and Inga promise to stay away.

  An officer of the court announces his case, and the judge walks in and takes her seat on the bench. He recognizes her immediately. She used to shop at one of his stores. She typically bought only a few items, suggesting that she cooked for no one but herself. He recalls that she frequently purchased red wine, though mostly on the weekend, and he also remembers that on more than one occasion, she came to the office to complain about being cheated.

  She puts on her glasses, opens the folder she brought with her, reads for a moment, then asks if either side has preliminary motions. Bogdan’s attorney stands and tells the judge that since his client does not dispute his guilt and will present no defense, he moves that the hearing proceed to judgment.

  The judge turns to the prosecutor and asks if he agrees to the motion. The young lawyer stands and says what Bogdan’s attorney predicted. “No, your honor. Given the defendant’s refusal to cooperate in the investigation, we prefer to make our case.”

  “Very well,” she says. “The motion is denied.”

  Over the next three-quarters of an hour, during which the prosecutor offers an opening statement and calls three witnesses, Bogdan is reduced to a set of despicable acts. Though he did everything alleged, as well as worse things that the prosecution and witnesses are not aware of, he does not recognize the individual they’re talking about. The man they describe is bold and brassy, untroubled by fear or scruple, above all decisive and in control of the situation. To hear them tell it, one might conclude he’s been wasted on crime, that he really ought to be president or prime minister, or at least commander of the nation’s armed forces. NATO could use a man like him too. He’d quell every heart in Al-Qaeda.

  “Hour after hour, day after day,” says the old professor from the building on Smolensk, “he and his accomplice tormented my neighbors and me. This man”—pointing an accusatory finger—“drove everyone else from their homes. Mrs. Kotkowska? She moved there in 1960, when she was no more than thirty. Forty-nine years she lived in that building. As a teenager, she risked her life delivering messages for the underground. For more than two decades, she worked at the Wawel chocolate factory, starting as a chocolatier and rising to a managerial position—which she lost in 1980, I wish to note, after being labeled an ‘antisocialist element’ due to her activities on behalf of Solidarity. When I urged her to resist their efforts to dislodge her from her home, this woman, whom neither of our most recent Occupation forces ever cowed, broke down and wept. Only that diabolical creature”—the finger again—“was able to break her spirit.”

  The woman who took the photos of him and phoned the police comes next. In her account, he becomes an accomplished high-altitude athlete, a dark lord of dance pirouetting across the perilous roof. If he’d been around in 1953, the world might not have heard of Hillary and Tenzing. She’s never seen a more audacious sight. “My heart nearly stopped when I looked out the window and spotted him up there,” she says. “Though given what he was doing to innocent people, I wish he’d gone over the edge.”

  The final witness is the older of the two officers who arrested him. Today, he’s dressed in a black suit, and he’s slicked his remaining hair over his bald spot. He tells the court that the defendant is as recalcitrant a criminal as he’s ever encountered. “We gave him numerous chances to cooperate, and he rebuffed every one of them.”

  “When you say that he ‘rebuffed’ them,” the prosecutor asks, “exactly what do you mean?”

  Though they are on the same side, it’s apparent that the detective finds the question irksome. “I just mean what I said. He rebuffed them.”

  The young lawyer’s face turns red. Bogdan can’t help but feel sorry for him. Like everybody else, he’ll be given a limited number of chances to make his mark on the world, and this is one of them. “Yes, but how did he do it? Did he simply sit there, for instance, with downcast eyes and remain silent? Or was the rebuffing accomplished in an activist manner?”

  “It was active.”

  “Could you explain?”

  “He more or less sneered at us.”

  “Verbally? Facially?”

  “Verbal and facial.”

  “Could you give the court a specific example?”

  “Well, when we showed him the photo of him running out of the building with the other guy, he said he didn’t have a partner, that he did it all on his own.”

  “And he sneered as he said it?”

  “Yes, sir, he did.”

  “Could you demonstrate for the court, please?”

  The officer sighs. Bogdan suspects he wouldn’t be a bad guy to watch a football match with, that you could stake out space with him at Pilsudski Stadium, drink a few beers, and analyze the shortcomings of Cracovia’s midfielders. The guy would probably rather be there than here. Still, he does what he’s been asked to do, puffing out his chest, the corner of his mouth curling up in a Cagneyesque smirk. “‘I don’t have any partner,’” he growls.

  “And how did he explain getting a key to the building?”

  “He said he stole it.”

  “Did he say who he stole it from?”

  “He said he forgot.”

  “But you didn’t believe him?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And what did he say when you asked why he had gone there in the first place?”

  “He said he went there because he was a shell of a person.”

  “Those were his exact words?”

  The policeman nods. “That he was a shell of a person and was drawn to old buildings that reminded him of himself.”

  “But you didn’t believe this either?”

  “I believed he was a shell of a person.”

  The defense attorney starts to rise, probably to object on some ground or another, but Bogdan lays his hand on his forearm, and he remains seated. The
attorney is not that interested in the proceedings anyway. His present client, like almost all the ones he’s assigned, is guilty beyond doubt. Furthermore, the attorney’s tooth is killing him. He suspects he needs a root canal, which theoretically the state health care system can handle. But the last time he went there, he learned the limits of theory. And because prices at private practices are low by Western standards, so many Brits, Germans, and Swedes come here for endodontic treatment that he’ll probably have to wait weeks for an appointment. His client is the least of his problems.

  “I’m suggesting that you didn’t believe the defendant went there,” the prosecutor says, “simply because he was a shell of a person.”

  “I believed only a shell of a person would do what he had done.”

  Bogdan wishes he could help the foundering prosecutor. It would be best for both of them if this ended quickly.

  “I mean you didn’t believe he went there and harassed the residents for any reason other than remuneration.”

  “No, sir, I did not.”

  “Could you tell the court why?”

  “Because he didn’t impress me as someone with enough initiative to take action on his own. I felt certain he’d been paid by somebody else to do what he did and that whoever it was also paid him to keep his mouth shut if he got caught.”

  “And you gave him plenty of opportunity to tell you who had paid him and who his partner was?”

  “Yes, sir. I most certainly did.”

  “Thank you,” the prosecutor says, then tells the judge he rests his case.

  With the exception of his own attorney, who has trouble remembering if his last name is Baranowski, Baranski, or Baranek, everyone in the small courtroom is directing his or her attention at Bogdan. He feels the warmth of their interest. It’s as if someone has rubbed analgesic into his chest. The sensation is not unpleasant. With humility, he bows before their concern.

  Each of them is using him as a measuring stick. The prosecutor is thinking that if the window of opportunity opens for you, you had better hurl yourself through it, because it will close quickly, just as it did for the defendant and his own father, who is also an attorney. In the ’80s he defended dissidents, always without success and always to his detriment, as the secret police subjected him and his family to constant harassment. Several of those dissidents are now powerful. A few are rich. Rather than court their favor, his father assumed they would knock on his door, just as they did before. Those knocks never came. He scrapes by drawing up wills for people who, unlike him, have things worth disposing of.

  Teresa is remembering what a docile baby her brother was. Their mother told her that she suffered from colic, that she hardly ever slept, that her face was always red and angry, her hands balled into fists. Whereas her baby brother lay in his bed smiling at the mobile that spun overhead. Such happiness! She recalls how he rolled a yellow dump truck across the floor when he was three or four, how he kept saying that the truck was driving to the U.S.A., though he hadn’t a clue where the U.S.A. was and her parents were always warning him not to say that kind of thing around strangers. Her brother never learned to ball his hands into fists, never learned to cry and turn red on behalf of his own cause. All he learned to do was get himself into trouble in the service of others. He’s had more than his share of bad luck.

  The judge does not believe in luck, though she used to. She has a forgettable face, forgettable hair that she let go iron gray in her forties, a forgettable body. No one made love to her until she was nearly thirty. The man who did it was a Czech doctor she met at a resort in Montenegro. When it started, she didn’t even know what was happening. When she finally caught on, her first thought was to stop it—he was breathing hard and pushing himself against her, and she wasn’t sure she appreciated that—but then she made the decision to go ahead and see what it was like. She expected it to hurt more than it did, and afterward she expected him to be more surprised than he was that she’d never done it before. It happened at least once a day for the rest of her stay, and when she came home, she took a little time to decide whether to pursue that kind of experience again. In the end, she elected to try it for a while. Over the next few years, she cut a broad swath, sleeping with more than forty men, including the prosecutor’s father. She closed that chapter with no regrets. She’s glad she did it and glad she’s not doing it anymore.

  She lives in a nicer flat than she ever expected to own. A few years ago, after a vacation in Tunis, she became fascinated with African and Middle Eastern cuisine and taught herself to prepare it. On Friday evenings, when she’s finished with her week’s work, she opens a bottle of wine and cooks a good meal, and afterward she sits on the couch and finishes the wine while listening to music or watching a movie. Once or twice a month, before she climbs into bed, she removes her nightgown. On those occasions, she never imagines being in bed with a man. Instead, she envisions what she would see if she were watching the scene: a woman with certain tastes and predilections enjoying her own body, able to satisfy herself.

  If this makes it sound like she’s a solitary person, with few if any friends, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. She’s got more friends than she knows what to do with. Most of them would tell you she’s one of the kindest people they know, the type of person who will bring you food when you’re sick or offer to drive an elderly neighbor shopping. When it comes to dinner parties, she’s at the top of the list. She turns down twice as many invitations as she accepts. When she would have welcomed more of them, they were seldom forthcoming. She understands why. Without realizing it, she had presented herself as an insecure, lonely woman who might need more from you than you were ready to give. Now she needs nobody. And almost everybody senses it.

  Bogdan does. The black robe, her gray hair, her expressionless face—everything about her suggests that she’s a strong woman with few failings who can be expected to administer stern justice. There’s no indication that she recalls their earlier encounters, how polite and considerate he was when she appeared in his office to complain. The sums she’d been cheated of were tiny, not worth arguing over. Handing her the money, he apologized and assured her that he and his partner were committed to preventing this from happening. On one of these occasions, he recalls, she asked why he didn’t simply walk over to the clerk, whom she would gladly point out, and fire her? He told her he hoped to solve the problem without cutting people loose, that most of them had worked there for years and had families that depended on them. “Undependable people,” she responded, “can’t be depended on by anybody.” Just as she would not have cut his clerks any slack, she’s not likely to cut him any. He can imagine what’s going through her mind: the man who comes before me is one of the dregs, a person of poor character, with weak will and no concern for others. A man who probably can’t be reformed, who can only be taken off the street for however long the law allows. Mercy is not her forte.

  He’s wrong in thinking she doesn’t recognize him. She knows she’s had prior dealings with him. But she can’t recall when or where. This in itself is unusual, as anyone who knows her would tell you. Her memory is the stuff of stories. She can recite entire passages of the most obscure case law. She knows the names and faces of everyone she’s ever sat in judgment of, who sang lead on every one of the Beatles’ tunes, which ones were composed by Lennon and McCartney and which ones weren’t, what time trains leave Krakow for Warsaw, Wroclaw, Gdansk, Berlin, Vienna, or any other city you care to name. But who this man is, what he did before he committed the crime in question, has escaped her. And she finds it troubling.

  “Mr. Baranowski,” she says, “will you please rise and approach the bench?”

  What she intends, when making this request, is that he step into the center of the small courtroom, stopping three or four meters away so that she can render her decision and he can respond if he chooses. Instead, he walks all the way up to the bench, halting only when he’s so close she can smell his aftershave. She can also see the ugly mole, in al
l its divided particulars, and that allows her to place him in the proper context. He used to run a grocery store that went out of business years ago. She recalls the two visits she made to his office, how he returned the money his clerks had stolen. She remembers thinking that he was a nice man, that since he wore a wedding ring, he had probably made someone a very good husband, someone for whom his disfigurement did not matter, because whoever she was, she could see beyond it. She also remembers thinking that his store would probably not last, that he did not have the heart of a businessman. She remembers the morning she went there to buy a half liter of milk and discovered she’d been correct. For a while, she wondered what had happened to him. Now she knows. She experiences the onslaught of a sorrow so profound that it robs her of speech.

  That evening, when the prosecutor describes this uncomfortable moment to his father, he will say that for an instant or two, he considered the possibility that she was suffering a stroke. “She was trying to get her lips to move, but it was like she couldn’t. She had a strange look on her face too.”

  “Strange, how?” his father will ask, treading carefully, for of course neither his son nor his wife is aware of what happened between the judge and him twenty years ago. It didn’t last long—six weeks—and while for her, it was nothing more than a brief affair, he fell deeply in love. He’s never gotten over it. If he sees her coming toward him in Planty or glimpses her at a sidewalk café or in Galeria Krakowska, he turns and heads the other way. He wants to spare her the longing she will not fail to recognize if she has to look into his eyes. It’s a good thing his son cannot see him, that their conversation takes place over the phone.

  “As if . . . It was almost as if she were about to cry or something. I thought maybe she’d lost a family member, but the court reporter told me she has no family. She said she thought it was strange too, that she’s never seen anything like it. It was . . . I’ll go ahead and say it. It was unseemly.”

  He’ll be right when he says that, and the judge realizes it herself, even as it’s happening. Bogdan understands it as well and believes he can guess the source of her discomfort and confusion. She has recognized him. She remembers how she came to his office, how he returned the money. She cannot understand how that man became this man who stands before her awaiting judgment. If he could tell her how it happened, he would. But he doesn’t know himself. He could tell her how one thing led to another, but each of them could just as easily have led somewhere else.